I am delighted to announce that our new Director for the Center for Business Analytics – Nagaraj Bukkapatnam – will be joining us on August 2. We had a strong pool of candidates, and we are delighted that Nagaraj accepted our offer. As you can see from the announcement below, he brings rich and diverse experience and knowledge to the position. He is strategic, entrepreneurial, well networked, and very committed to exciting students about the world of business analytics. This was an important search since the center will be the hub and help drive the success of our new Business Analytics Initiative. I want to thank our search committee for their hard work and engagement in this hiring process, especially at a very busy time of the year. The committee was co-chaired by me and Tevfik and included Michael Goldberg, Jenn Griffith, Noele Lee, James McIlroy, Svetlana Petrova, Leslie Smith, and Goksel Yalcinkaya. Carrie Grube from HR and Karie Fisher from the Dean’s Office also provided invaluable help in staffing the committee and the process. Please join me in welcoming Nagaraj to our Paul community.
-- Dean Deborah Merrill-Sands-*+`
Thought leader and strategist in disruptive technologies joins Paul College
Paul College’s Center for Business Analytics will have Nagaraj Bukkapatnam as the new director. He will be joining the team on August 2.
Bukkapatnam is currently a business and technology strategist at AscendLogix Inc., practice director (AI, enterprise development and training) at ITTStar Consulting, and executive in residence at the Rutgers Business School’s Center for Market Advantage. His areas of expertise include AI, Digital Analytics, Market Analysis, Product Innovation and Design.
Among the projects he has worked on, Bukkapatnam developed a system for fingerprint analysis and matching algorithm for a public enterprise, implemented the first ever conversational speech recognition system in telecommunications at AT&T, and developed one of the first digital analytics systems for predicting business outcomes based on sentiment and emotion.
What makes Bukkapatnam uniquely suited to be the Center for Business Analytics’ inaugural director is his added experience of fostering academic-corporate partners to integrate experiential learning into the curriculum, mentoring students on internships and job opportunities, advising companies on developing competencies, and experience as a speaker at educational, technology and business forums. As executive in residence at RBS CMA, Bukkapatnam focuses on experiential learning and value co-creation through corporate collaboration.
Bukkapatanam holds an MBA from Rutgers University, a master’s in computer applications, and a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Osmania University.
